Sweet Soy Pork with Potato Chips

[ts]
This is an Indonesian-inspired dish from Jaden's upcoming Steamy Kitchen cookbook.

It's ground pork cooked with kecap manis (sweet soy sauce) and served with potato chips. Potato chips! Genius.

I felt the same curiosity and surprise when I first heard about lomo saltado, a Peruvian beef stir-fry with French fries, and thit bo xao voi khoai tay chien, a Vietnamese beef stir-fry also with French fries.

In this case, I tried "oven-frying" the chips, but they didn't turn out too crisp. They were more like round fries than chips. As with the two stir-fries mentioned, we, of course, enjoyed this dish with white rice.




Lomo Saltado & Thit Bo Xao Voi Khoai Tay Chien info
at Wandering Chopsticks
at Tasty Meals at Home

________________
Posts featuring recipes tested from Jaden's Steamy Kitchen cookbook:
Tea-smoked Salmon Sandwich with Sweet Dijon Mustard
Shrimp Chips with Five-Spice Beef
Kimchi Fried Rice, an addiction
Crispy Tofu with Sweet Chili Soy Sauce
Sweet Soy Pork with Potato Chips

Tea-smoked Salmon Sandwich with Sweet Dijon Mustard

[ts]
This was one of those times when we had to "make it work."

The whole thing started out so promising. I was testing another recipe from Jaden's upcoming Steamy Kitchen cookbook: Tea-smoked Salmon. Her delicious-looking photograph of the finished product was enticement enough.

I was excited.

I prepared the smoking mixture of tea, sugar, (some salt?) and Szechuan peppercorns. I placed it on foil at the bottom of our steamer. I turned the heat on and waited for the smoke.



Smoke!

So I placed the two pieces of salmon to smoke. (Note: I should've put the salmon fillets on something, not directly on the steamer surface. Or, lightly oiled the surface. The fish stuck a bit.)

This time, I can blame the blurry/fuzzy picture on the smoke and not my shoddy photography skills.

[ts]
At the recommended end of cooking time, I checked the fish. And yes, even though Jaden wrote in the recipe that the fish will still look like its raw self, I was still afraid.

It went downhill from there.

Mistake #1: Not trusting the cooking time indicated in the recipe.

I set about smoking the fish for more time.

Mistake #2: Very erroneous heat control.

After I added 10 more minutes to the cooking time. I shut off the heat. I checked the fish. It seemed ready, I thought. However, I think it was JS who kept insisting that it wasn't cooked yet! (Yes, I blame her. Bwahahaha.)

So, after much hesitation, I decided that I would smoke the salmon some more. Since I turned the heat off, there was no more smoke. Instead of heating the smoking mixture first sans fish and waiting for smoke, I placed the whole fish-steamer-smoking-mixture configuration back on the heat and turned it to high.

Anyway, to make this very long-winded story short, the high heat cooked the salmon in a very unattractive way and burned the smoking mixture. You did not want to be in our kitchen that day.

The outside of the salmon was a brownish-grey and there were little dots of white (its coagulated fat, I guess). Not very appetizing.

Scraping off the brownish-grey film on exterior, I tasted the flesh and found that it was still OK to eat, albeit a tad too smoky in flavor.

So, we decided to salvage as much salmon as possible and make a smoked salmon sandwich spread. We added mayo, cornichons, green onions, lemon juice and Dijon mustard. We also made a sweet Dijon sauce to go with it.

The sweetness of the sauce and the tanginess of the cornichons and lemon juice mellowed the smoky flavor of the salmon. We had some of JS's Swedish Limpa Bread on hand and decided to make ourselves some sandwiches.

(This could work as a dip too, I would think.)



[ts]
So... did we "make it work?"

________________
Posts featuring recipes tested from Jaden's Steamy Kitchen cookbook:
Tea-smoked Salmon Sandwich with Sweet Dijon Mustard
Shrimp Chips with Five-Spice Beef
Kimchi Fried Rice, an addiction
Crispy Tofu with Sweet Chili Soy Sauce
Sweet Soy Pork with Potato Chips

Crispy Tofu with Sweet Chili Soy Sauce

[ts]
Pretty wordless, this one.

This is another recipe that I tested from Jaden's upcoming cookbook (Steamy Kitchen). This simply called for pressing and pan-frying some tofu, then making this wonderfully delicious sweet and spicy soy sauce. I used soy sauce, our own belado, garlic, honey/brown sugar and rice vinegar.

This was a hit!

I only made the quantity as per the recipe. So the biggest problem with the recipe was that it was not enough! We had the gong sisters over and upon trying it, they asked me immediately for the recipe!

For the exact recipe (ingredients and procedure), buy Jaden's book! =)

(Apparently, I am compensating not having a lengthy post by using a lot of exclamation marks!!! But, they're warranted because this really was so good!!!)




________________
Posts featuring recipes tested from Jaden's Steamy Kitchen cookbook:
Tea-smoked Salmon Sandwich with Sweet Dijon Mustard
Shrimp Chips with Five-Spice Beef
Kimchi Fried Rice, an addiction
Crispy Tofu with Sweet Chili Soy Sauce
Sweet Soy Pork with Potato Chips

Kimchi Fried Rice, an addiction

yolk-ooze

[js]
Sorry, our handful of readers, if I haven't been keeping up with my reading and commenting on your blogs. I'm still mired in the moving of stuff and it really is sapping all my energies.

This has been going on for close to two weeks now: by "this," I mean the carrying of boxes to and fro, unpacking and not knowing where to put these items, returning the boxes to where I found them, and then repeating the entire process again. I had thought that I'd be done by now, but I foresee more boxes in my future.

To clarify, I've been done with my stuff since last week. What I am having problems with is the "general" stuff that nobody seems to "own." It's funny that these things that seem to belong to no one somehow ended up in this new house. Boxes of "orphans" that found their way here, for me to scratch my head over.

We haven't really been cooking in the new house yet -- or at least, not yet blogging. We seem to have reverted back to our repertoire of homestyle, quick and easy meals for these hectic aftermath-of-moving days.

Like this kimchi fried rice.


That spatula there is for scale. Unfortunately, the HEIGHT or mound-iness of this batch is not quite obvious from this angle.

[js]
One of my first purchases for our fridge in the new house was a jar full of kimchi. I thought at the very least we could have some kimchi fried rice if ever we were so very desperate.

We have lots of eggs in our fridge from the move-in day. It is supposed to be auspicious to bring eggs into a new house. Signs of fertility, I guess?

[ts]
We've had kimchi fried rice out in restaurants, but I never really thought to make it at home until I tested Jaden's kimchi fried rice recipe for her upcoming Steamy Kitchen cookbook.

I tell you, that opened the fried rice floodgates! With Jaden's fried rice technique, I didn't have the problem of getting "tired" by tossing and tossing a big pan of rice.

After making kimchi fried rice that first time, we got addicted! We have to have it now, at all sorts of odd hours too. Our mother, CSC -- they've both requested kimchi fried rice many times. Sometimes, especially after particularly long days, nothing beats sitting down to a moundful of this kimchi fried rice.



[js]
This is so good that we can finish this whole skillet just the two of us -- and we have! Just look at the proof above.

On the bright side of being behind, because I haven't done any blog-reading in the past week or so, I do have a lot of delicious stuff to get caught up on! I can't wait to get back in the swing of things in the next week or so.

eatingclub vancouver Korean
Korean Sprouts & Spicy Cold Cucumber Salad
Kimchi Fried Rice, an addiction
Korean Soybean Sprouts Pancake (Kongnamul Jeon)
Korean Pork Bulgogi (with Muu Namul, Kong Namul)
Korean Roast Salmon
Korean Fried Chicken
Korean Sweet Potatoes with Yangnyeom Sauce
Japchae / Jap Chae (Korean Glass Noodles with Vegetables)
Brown Rice Bibimbap (Korean Rice Bowl)
Korean Oxtail Soup (Gom Tang)

________________
Posts featuring recipes tested from Jaden's Steamy Kitchen cookbook:
Tea-smoked Salmon Sandwich with Sweet Dijon Mustard
Shrimp Chips with Five-Spice Beef
Kimchi Fried Rice, an addiction
Crispy Tofu with Sweet Chili Soy Sauce
Sweet Soy Pork with Potato Chips

Steamy Kitchen's Shrimp Chips with Five-Spice Beef

my photo;
of course, Jaden's photo is going to be a hundred times better

[ts]
As you may or may not know, Jaden of Steamy Kitchen is in the process of writing her cookbook(!). As part of the process, Jaden called out to people to test her recipes. I, of course, answered the call.

This dish is her take on Tex-Mex "nachos".

First, the shrimp chips.


The chips I bought happened to be the colored kind. The uncooked discs are so pretty! They go into hot oil and puff up. This was actually the part that I thought would be a "hassle" (we're deep-fry averse), but it was relatively pain-free -- the chips puff up quite quickly so the whole process didn't take long at all.



Now for the Five-Spice Beef.

Actually, it was "Cinnamon Beef" when I tested the recipe, but I believe it may be amended to five-spice. This was also super-simple and easy. I can't give out the recipe here... you have to buy Jaden's book for that! =)

To start, I sautéed some aromatics, followed by the spices. The beef went in and so did the seasonings. As a final touch, some red bell peppers, cilantro and store-bought fried shallots.






The Five-Spice Beef goes on top of the shrimp chips (like the photo up top).

Or, in our case, we used the beef as our "dip" and ate the dish that way (see below).


This played the role of mid-afternoon snack quite nicely.


________________
Posts featuring recipes tested from Jaden's Steamy Kitchen cookbook:
Tea-smoked Salmon Sandwich with Sweet Dijon Mustard
Shrimp Chips with Five-Spice Beef
Kimchi Fried Rice, an addiction
Crispy Tofu with Sweet Chili Soy Sauce
Sweet Soy Pork with Potato Chips